Hola! My name´s Sally and I have been living on the beautiful island of Fuerteventura with my family for over 18 years now. I have 2 beautiful children who were born here and speak both English and Spanish fluently. I am a self employed Spanish teacher and have been working for the past 8 years with students all around this lovely island and also on Skype. I started to teach Spanish by chance after a friend asked me if I would organise some classes for the local church and the rest is history.
One of the most frequent questions that I get asked is if one of my parents are Spanish or if I learnt it when I was young. The answer is no, in fact French is part of our family history and that was the language that I chose to do at school. I first started to learn Spanish at 17 as part of my first year in college and managed to get a pass, although the Spanish was basic it was enough to get by.
Before I moved here, I started having private Spanish classes from home with a wonderful tutor, Viv, in 2004. This was more intense than my GCSE course and I found that I learnt a lot more than before but the tutor was without doubt far better at teaching than my other one was. One of the things that I will be forever grateful for is her teaching me the chanting of the verbs Ser and Estar which, to this day is still stuck in my head like the lyrics from your favourite song.
When I arrived on the island I realised that I needed to learn even more Spanish, more vocabulary but most of all to practice more. This was a difficult thing for me as someone who wouldn´t naturally just walk up to a stranger and introduce herself but by chance a Spanish neighbour, Gloria, had a little boy the same age as mine and we became great friends. She was, amazingly, an English teacher and although we never conversed in English, I felt more relaxed talking to her as I knew that if we got stuck then she could explain things to me.
Without question, this daily practice was what improved my Spanish tremendously. There were times when I didn´t want to practice, that my head hurt, that I was tired but I perservered and within a short time I noticed how much easier the words came into my head.
I stayed using the present tense for quite a while, longer than I should have really, until I decided that I needed to really knuckle down and study the other tenses. This was when my passsion for the language really started. I tried to find formulas and patterns to make the learning easier. I sat and studied the dictionary, I learnt a new verb each week, I engrossed myself in all things Spanish, I challenged myself in different situations that were way out of my comfort zone.
When I started teaching, I found that I was relying less and less on Spanish text books and started to use my own material that I had written to focus more on conversation and speaking Spanish. I started to develop my own methods and found that the students learnt quicker and easier with them. All of this made me realise that it would be beneficial to write a booklet and therefore the idea of Kickstart Spanish was born.
I started writing the booklet in 2018 and used it as part of a few 6 week Spanish courses that I did. This enabled me to see what worked and what didn´t, what I needed to add and what I needed to take away. Mainly, the outcome was really positive and the feedback from the course was great, people said that they had taken various Spanish courses before but never felt able to go out and speak Spanish. With my course, they had. My students liked the fact that they had easy grammar that was useful and multi functional without having to conjugate verbs on page one!
As I started to have numerous requests for Spanish online courses I decided that to go with the booklet, it would be beneficial to have a few videos with voiceover to help with pronounciation. To start with, not being very technology minded this was a struggle but eventually I found an application that I liked and little by little started working on the videos. With working, being a Mum and a wife, I found the progress slow but rewarding.
Throughout my journey of teaching Spanish, I have been very lucky and privileged to have had the help of a few friends who, in their spare moments, produced videos, built websites, proof read and most of all encouraged me with my work enabling me to release both SpanishwithSally and Kickstart Spanish.
Hopefully Kickstart is just the beginning as I am already writing booklet number 2, so far so good.
I hope that you find this website useful, I have tried to make things as clear as possible at all times and am constantly working adding new free material for learning Spanish online. If you feel like you would like to see something that isn´t on the page please feel free to email me with any welcome suggestions on:
info@spanishwithsally.com
or join me to learn Spanish on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/spanishwithsally/
and learn Spanish on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6zKU81KgaT4F4JA6T9ph_Q?view_as=subscriber